Ray Vaughn Wasted No Time Getting at Joey Bada$$ With “Hoe Era”

Ray Vaughn crafts wordplay sharp enough to slice through the 808s, utilizing receipts on plaques, acting gigs, crew loyalty, and even arena naming rights.

Well, that escalated quickly.

The Long Beach firebrand, newly folded into Top Dawg Entertainment’s bullpen of left-coast stylists, Rae Vaughn hardly waited for the ink on his mixtape drop (The Good, The Bad & The Dollar Menu) to dry before unloading “Hoe Era,” a snarling West Coast 808 barrage aimed squarely at Joey Bada$$. The timing feels strategic: Joey had only just used Red Bull’s Spiral freestyle platform to swat at West Coast momentum, and Vaughn seized that provocation as license to put Brooklyn back on the defensive. The result is a record that moves like a drive-by in broad daylight—windows down, subs rattling, and metaphors ricocheting everywhere.

From the opening hook, Vaughn weaponizes playground taunts with the precision of someone who has clocked the memes his opponent can’t outrun. The stuttered callback “finished or you done” re-packages Birdman’s infamous Breakfast Club blow-up as trolling soundtrack, reminding listeners that sometimes the simplest rhetorical loop is the most humiliating, especially when it’s welded to a bass line that seems to laugh at its own menace.

The opening verse fires first at Joey’s résumé: “Baby teeth, you ain’t even got a plaque yet.” On the surface, it’s an easy jab—Joey actually does possess a platinum single in “Devastated,” but Vaughn’s gambit is to treat that lone plaque as negligible, a participation trophy his opponent didn’t really earn. When he follows with “Run, Joey, run, we gon’ aim it at yo’ backpack,” he’s mocking the nostalgia-soaked backpack-rap aura that once defined the 1999-era Pro Era collective and still trails Joey like an oversized Jansport. The “you should act more, you should rap less” punchline lands because Joey’s Hollywood side hustle is no secret; Vaughn is basically baiting him to pick a lane.

That taunt keeps snowballing: “Catch him at the Staples Center, bet you I’ma spark—Goofy, don’t let Power get your TV turned off.” Staples has been Crypto.com Arena for three years, so Vaughn simultaneously dates Joey’s sense of place and drags his rival’s acting gig as Unique on Power Book III (and the Kendrick reference for “TV Off”), hinting that the same show that elevated Joey’s profile could also be the stage that gets him “clipped.” Elsewhere, he sneers, “Conductor got you soundin’ like you in a jazz band,” framing Joey’s recent work with sample wizard Conductor Williams as retro cosplay rather than forward motion—another way of calling his boom-bap fidelity stale. Even inner-circle allies catch strays: “CJ like forty and he on drugs,” a hyperbolic swipe at Pro Era co-founder CJ Fly, who is actually 31 but old enough for Vaughn to paint as burnt-out baggage. When the verse closes with “Skeletons inside my closet playin’ Bone Thugs,” he flips an idiom into an audio gag, those skeletons aren’t rattling; they’re harmonizing like Cleveland’s melodic legends, then threatens to “put the whole Pro Era on a Pro Club,” reducing Joey’s crew to blank white tees you can buy three for ten on Slauson.

The next verse widens the assault. “Want smoke, I’m a vape lord” turns a cliché into a pun: he doesn’t just welcome smoke, he’s digitized and flavored it. “Standing next to Soul ain’t gon’ save yours” is a sly elbow at Joey posing with Ab-Soul during the Red Bull Spiral Freestyle session, as if proximity to Vaughn’s own labelmate grants immunity, while doubling as a play on the word “soul” itself. “Fans only know you for the acts, not the blaps” drives home the critique that Joey’s Hollywood credits overshadow his studio catalogue, re-framing the actor-rapper duality as lopsided showmanship.

By the time ke keeps throwing punches, Vaughn has the scorecard out: “Your last slap was in 2017”—a reference to the year “Devastated” broke platinum and, in Vaughn’s telling, the last time Joey landed a hit that mattered. He paints himself as a hooper who can “deal with niggas on the screen,” a reminder that diss records now migrate instantly to every social feed and that Vaughn, fluent in that space, knows how to turn a bar into a rollout. The line “Dot didn’t respond, now you tryna call Cole out?” ridicules Joey for vaulting from one giant (Kendrick) to another (J. Cole) after failing to draw blood the first time.

The closing verse is pure demolition. “Rakim stupid ass, think he Rak-him” clown-shoes Joey’s frequent claims to golden-age lineage by dragging the sacred name of Rakim (hip-hop’s original God MC) into a pun that reads as outright blasphemy to purists, underscoring how casually Vaughn breaks taboos. He then coils multiple brand flips into single bars: bullets whiz “like sounds on the Neptunes,” beef flips from “lobster” to “Deadpool,” and Red Bull’s promise of wings becomes the means by which Joey’s ego gets shot sky-high. The haymaker arrives when Vaughn scoffs, “You let Ice Spice turn into the king of New York,” invoking A Boogie’s viral coronation of the Bronx star to argue that Joey ceded home-court advantage to newcomers while he was busy auditioning.

Taken as a whole, “Hoe Era” feels less like a diss track and more like a forensic autopsy of Joey Bada$$’s public persona. Vaughn pulls receipts on plaques, acting gigs, crew loyalty, and even arena naming rights, bending each into wordplay sharp enough to slice through the 808s. His writing thrives on telescoping references: local (“Pro Club” tees), generational (Birdman memes), and canonical (Rakim, Bone Thugs), stitched together so tightly the song never pauses to admire its own cleverness. That density is exactly the point—every layer crowds Joey’s reply window with new angles to defend. If the Pro Era founder chooses silence, Vaughn will claim he proved his thesis; if Joey fires back, Vaughn has already framed the battlefield on West Coast terms. Either way, the diss works because it feels like Vaughn knows his rival’s narrative almost better than Joey does and can reduce it, at will, to a single two-syllable epithet: “Ho-ey.”